Monthly Archives: October 2009

Stolen Therapy

Someone stole my therapy appointment today. I saw it happen.

I’ve been out of therapy since the beginning of August. I’ve been trying to get back in it since the beginning of September when I had my little freak out.

I had finally had an appointment scheduled for this morning. I dressed in a cute outfit, which is very much in contrast to my routine ‘stay inside doing homework outfit’ that is typical of my Thursdays.

I wasn’t at all familiar with the neighborhood his office is in (despite the location being close to my home) so I left early. And by early I mean I allowed an hour an a half for what turned out to be a 20 minute trip.

I have a thing about not entering therapist offices more than ten minutes early (earlier feels invasive on my part), so I walked in circles around the area and killed a lot of time in a coffee shop.

Finally, 10 minutes till the appointment I went into the waiting room and I sat down.
A few minutes later a man, probably late twenties early thirties, enters the waiting room.
‘Do we just wait here, or..?”, He asks

I shrugged and said ‘I assume so, it’s my first time here’
It was clearly his first time as well.

Then commenced the awkward situation of being in a small waiting room and attempting to avoid all conversation and eye contact. I stared intently at the generic waiting room art.

At Noon, my time for the appointment. A guy walks out of an office. ‘Is one of you here for Dr. X?’
The waitingroom man says, “Yes” and follows the guy into an office.

I have a auditory processing disorder. One of the things that means is that I have a lag time for understanding auditory info. So basically I didn’t understand the sound part of what happened until after both people were gone.

Dr. X was the doctor I was there to meet with.

I sat there for 10 minutes trying to figure out what happened. “Maybe they’re only meeting for a couple of minutes”, “Maybe he accidentally double booked”, “Maybe I was supposed to show up last week”, “Maybe my appointment is later today”, “Maybe I showed up at the wrong address and it happens to be the office of another psychiatrist who happens to have the same name in the same general area”

I felt  uncomfortable,like I shouldn’t be there, even though I knew my appointment time was correct. I’m very careful about these things. I check and recheck when writing it down. I read it back after writing it down as well. The probability of me writing the wrong time down is very small.
Ten minutes of this and I went into the hall and called my parents. I watched the door to see if this man would leave making my appointment available again. Twenty minutes past, against my parents advice that I should either phone the therapist or knock on his door, I left to go home.

I’m so busy. I’m juggling full time school, an internship, leadership roles in extra curricular activities and maintaining my ridiculous GPA standards. I hardly had time for this appointment. I especially I don’t have time to sit in an waiting room for an hour to wait for an appointment that isn’t happening.

I forced in into my schedule. Because I need it badly. My word repeating is at an all time worst. I’m terrified my neighbors can hear, because the volume is much too loud. Every night I pick apart my day and beat myself over every awkward imperfect interaction. There are a lot of them. One thing I am good at is creating awkward moments.
I don’t have time to sit in an waiting room for an hour to wait for an appointment that isn’t happening.

I cried my way home. Wow that’s a cliche sounding line. Sorry about that.

I didn’t feel comfortable calling the therapist. I considered not doing anything, just forgetting about this therapist so I could avoid the awkward interaction that would result from confronting him about this issue.

I whined to my Dad a lot on the phone and finally I agreed to let him call the therapist. I gave him permission just to gather facts, not to make a new appointment.

Here’s what happened:

-That man didn’t have an appointment at all. He’d just shown up. He wasn’t even already patient. He was just a person who showed up.

-The therapist hadn’t checked to see who his next appointment was with before going to fetch someone from the waiting room.

-When that man was able to react faster than me, he stole my appointment (Who does that!? Did he think therapy was just some sort of drop in thing?) and it took the therapist a significant part of the appointment to realize what had happened.

-Then the therapist went into the waiting room to look for me, but I was long gone.

I made an appointment for next week. I’m willing to give this guy another shot, though I’m not pleased about the whole situation. It threw off my homework schedule badly, because I was too upset to get work done. The only work I got done today was the work I did before I left to go to therapy.

In all my hypothetical situations I wondered about in that waiting room, the idea of someone stealing my therapy appointment wasn’t one that would have ever occurred to me.

24 hours

It’s scary how fast things change.

A month ago I was having a perfectly fine uneventful day. It was the last day of my week off before school started. I was feeling wonderfully relaxed.

Then I checked my mail. I’d previously requested my records from a partial hospital program I had been to several years ago. They’d arrived. I wanted them more for my obsession with recording keeping and possessing anything anyone has ever  written about me and storing it in my filing cabinet than anything else. There was some curiosity about how they would write about the part where I was forced to take off my pants despite clearly refusing, but mostly I planed to skim through it and file it away.

First couple of pages, nothing too exciting.

Third page. “Hey! They got my age wrong. Typical.”

I read more. “Wait a second. I don’t have schizophrenia. ” I looked at the top of the page. It had someone else’s name on it. It wasn’t about me. There were 3 pages of someone else’s records in the middle of my stapled packet.

To say I was not pleased would be a major understatement.

Confidentiality is a major hot button issue for me. If they were careless with this person’s info maybe they were or will be careless with mine?

I work very hard to keep my privacy. I don’t have any close friends and especially not at school. I can’t trust anyone. If someone gets too close they might find out how crazy I am and somehow that will lead to my school finding out, because no one can keep a secret and that will lead to me getting kicked out of school again. I know it’s paranoid, but I have to protect myself. No one else will.

This reactivated and exacerbated all of my fears about my privacy being violated, anger towards health professionals who have been sloppy with confidentiality in the past, anger towards people who have used my personal information against me. I had just an overall sense of powerlessness, anger and feeling overwhelmed. I can’t put it into words that do it justice so I’m just going to stop trying. Point is I was extremely upset. I’m getting teary now a month later writing about it.

It took less than 24 hours for me to fall apart. The day after getting the letter I called the hospital. It took talking to 3 people at the hospital to get someone who understood what it meant when I said “HIPAA Violation”. One person said “Hippo Violation?” and tried to transfer me to security. No joke. Class act they’re running. They fed me a “We’re taking this seriously” line.

I was having cycling panic attacks. I’d taken my maximum daily dose of klonopin and it felt like I hadn’t taken a thing.

So what next? Clearly the logical step is to take a bunch of painkillers, right? Of course. So I did that.

And well I had a box of nicotine patches I’d been hanging onto for over a year just this sort of occasion. I’d thought about throwing them out before, lucky for me I still had them. I put all of them on from the previously unopened-box.

I lay down in my bed for awhile. I’m not sure how long, maybe an hour. I decided I’d made some bad decisions. I took off the patches and made myself vomit up as much as I could. I was extremely dizzy. I realized I had no mouthwash. I zig-zagged my way over to the store to buy some. Came back, vomited some more (this time without the help of fingers).

I felt significantly calmer once the dominant problem shifted from emotional to physical. I went to sleep for the night. I was still a mess for the following 2 weeks,but that first 24 hours was the worst part of it.

It is terrifying to look back and see how quickly things escalated. At the time it felt like much longer than a day. It’s scary to know that no matter no stable I am for how long these things can still happen out of nowhere. I’m always at risk that one day I could be fine the next I might kill myself.

—

This is the end of the post, but here’s some more writing anyway. I didn’t want to get bogged down with extraneous information that isn’t about the point of the post, but here some is.  I didn’t want this swept under the rug. I wanted to throw everything at them and not let them get away with it. I called more lawyers than I could keep count of and each kept referring me to another lawyer. I kept calling them until I reached one who never returned my call. A lot of this lawyer-calling was more related to my past school issues than my present issue. I was extremely lenient with my school. I could have been significantly more aggressive, but opted for gentler methods because I wanted to preserve my relationship with the school.

Ultimately it turned out that part of the other person’s file had been put in my folder my the social worker who had done both of our intakes. None of my pages were missing from the file (or so they tell me). They said they’d “talk” to the social worker. So wrist slapping, basically. I get it mistakes happen, but these mistakes can have big consequences.

Oh yes I should have gone to the hospital. Blah, blah, blah. Don’t anyone dare lecture me. I’d have gladly gone to get checked out physically  at the point where I’d vomited things up. But I didn’t want to be trapped there and risk messing up another semester of school. I know okay, priorities, maybe ours are not the same. School trumps physical health. And also wasn’t exactly feeling very trusting about hospital’s abilities to keep my confidentiality so no way was I going to risk telling them more information.